ECOWAS Free Movement Affecting National Security, Says Fulani Leader

ECOWAS Free Movement Affecting National Security, Says Fulani Leader

Kemi Olaitan in Ibadan

The National President, Gan Allah Fulani Development Association, Alhaji Sale Bayari, yesterday said Nigeria needed to review her position and pull-out of the ECOWAS free movement protocol which was affecting her national security.

Bayari while addressing journalists at the secretariat of the Oyo State Correspondents’ Chapel, in Ibadan, on the proposed anti-grazing bill which has passed second reading at the state House of Assembly, also called for human face and alternative grazing space before the law was passed.

He said small and light weapons were not only in the hands of herdsmen but other tribes with all Nigerians suffering insecurity, stating that there had been a drop in kidnapping in the South-west since the group met with former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo.

While maintaining that there were over 300 clans of Fulani extraction of which Bororo was just one of them, Bayari insisted that generalising the crime of a few on the majority would be tantamount to injustice.

According to him, “We pledge today that we shall ensure that our members are law abiding, obedient and respectful to constituted authorities while promising to go all out to ensure that criminal elements were flushed out of our communities and ethnic group which may even make the enactment of the anti-open grazing law no longer necessary or absolute.

“We call for a human face to this law in the event it becomes absolutely necessary to promulgate and pass into law. We appeal for an alternative grazing space for our means of livelihood, which is the cattle, which we are rearing as peasant traditional stockowners, not as commercial livestock or cattle business stakeholders.”

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